iVillage Entertainment

Julianne Moore has the reputation of being nice, and not in the Hollywood sense of being sickeningly sweet to the people who matter and ignoring everyone else. So who is this woman in the Manhattan hotel suite that's screaming bloody murder? Moore has just hung up from a phone interview with a journalist and is ‑- there's no other phrase for it ‑- going off. The stupid questions, the clichés, the inanity of the whole thing. She's got better things to do with her time, and this isn't just some diva act, because there's nobody in the room watching her. Her next interview is standing outside the door, listening... terrified.

There are a few moments of silence and then she opens the door. Moore is back to being composed and patient. She gets herself comfortable on the couch, which is easy, because she's not in red-carpet attire but is wearing cropped jeans and a wispy aqua-tinged top. It's an outfit a downtown working mom might wear to the office, and that's just what she is today, having popped up from her loft in Tribeca for a few "meetings," while her husband, director Bart Freundlich, is in charge of their two kids, Cal, seven, and Liv, three.

"It's hard, but it's what everyone is doing," the 45-year-old says about working motherhood. While she's chatting, Freundlich calls, checking to see when she'll be home. She puts the phone on silent and keeps going. A car will whisk her back downtown soon enough.

"You do the best you can," she adds. "The thing that's nicest for us is that we have some flexibility. That's the hardest, hardest thing. I see it at the nursery school. Every mother I know talks about that."

Keeping many balls in the air is also a constant theme of the characters she plays, the latest of which, in Freedomland, is a modern mom trying to find out the fate of her missing son. Samuel L. Jackson plays the detective who helps her sort out the details as the case becomes a mess of racial tensions. The role is edgier than others she's had lately ‑- like the distraught mom in The Forgotten and the divorce lawyer in Laws of Attraction ‑- because it's based on the gritty book by Richard Price. But all of her film roles have had a distinct level of emotion even if the settings are more genteel.

Even when she played another '50s housewife last fall in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, after getting Oscar nominations for two of those roles in 2000 for Far from Heaven and The Hours, she infused a sense of passion and spirit into the character that lifted the film to a level where people were talking about her as an Oscar contender yet again. Playing Evelyn Ryan, a mother of 10 with an alcoholic husband, who supports her family by winning jingle-writing contests, could have made her seem typecast in the role of the struggling suburban mom.

"What's different about that role is that it's based on a true story," she says of Prize Winner. "The responsibility is entirely different. It's about how you bring the character to life in your own way, while remaining faithful to the spirit of who she was."

Moore's husband thinks these mother roles, particularly the '50s housewife ones, are just par for the course because Moore is so good at giving her characters an inner life. This is what shot her to fame in Todd Haynes's Safe in 1995 and attracted Freundlich's attention to cast her in his first movie, 1997's The Myth of Fingerprints.

"There's not a lot of opportunity for women of that generation in these films to express themselves verbally or make any big movements. They don't slap anyone or yell; they are always perfect. But Juli's able to communicate the brokenness ‑- the complexity ‑- behind that," he says.

Moore says that watching her mother go through some of the emotions of being "stuck" as a military wife, always following her husband through various posts, helped as well.

"She was married at 20," Moore says, "and only had a year of nursing school. It was just when things were changing, so I was quite aware as a teenager that there were things I took for granted that my mother didn't have ‑- that we had choices, that we could have an education, could have a family and a career."

While exploring these feelings on screen, Moore has learned lessons in her own life. She and Freundlich share parental duties, alternating work schedules so that only one of them is busy at a time. At least that's their goal. With both in demand, it doesn't always work out.

Last year, they ended up busy at the same time because Moore was starring in Freundlich's latest film, Trust the Man, playing an actress and mother of two kids the same age as hers (Liv makes a cameo in a final scene). That put the burden of the family on her shoulders, since directing is such a huge time commitment, and it put Moore in charge of their move to a new home.

When she chose to do Freedomland following that, it was because it was shooting nearby and during vacation, and she needed the "break." These days, that's what constitutes playtime to the working actress and mom.